Alisha+Ravi+-+Meditation+2

Meditation #2 How can we bridge the gap between home and school literacies? When I started with my students in September, I gave them a writing assignment as a baseline for myself, and as a writing sample to refer to at the end of the year. As I was reading through these assignments, the first thing that came to my mind was that they write like they talk. My students use the same slang that they do at home, and with their peers, in their formal writing. How to bridge this gap is a question that I have been grappling with all year, and while I cannot say that I have found any strategies that have been overly successful, I find myself more aware of the differences between their home, and their school language. This has allowed me to point out these differences to my students, and hopefully encourage them to think more about their language usage. After hearing about the Flip the Switch Activity (Turner, 2009, p. 61-61), I decided to try to use this as a way to get my students thinking about the ways that they use language. We spent some time creating scenarios, focusing on scenarios that the students would often find themselves in, for example, talking to the principal, or their parents. We also had students think about how they would present themselves at job, or college interviews. While the students had fun with this activity and did put some thought into their responses, we ran into roadblocks when students insisted that they greeted the principal in the same way that they do their friends. Some students also struggled to see the purpose of the activity. While it did get my students thinking about language for the moment, the Flip the Switch activity left no lasting effects on the writing or speaking of my students in the classroom. My Linguistic Dimensions study allowed me to delve further into these discrepancies between my students’ home, and school literacies. I began my Linguistic Dimensions study with a student survey about home reading practices. Some of my students indicated that they had once loved to read, but no longer did. Far more of them indicated that they never read for pleasure and were never read to as children. To these students, reading was a chore. I was happy to find that many of my students do write for pleasure, but since they write in the form they are most comfortable in, this brought me no closer to bridging the gap between home, and school literacies, and teaching my students to code-switch in the classroom. In my lessons, I hoped to use my students knowledge, and use of social media to my advantage. I had them correct the capitalization in celebrity Tweets. In this case, my students recognized that social media required a different code than Standard English. They took the activity as a judgment of their social media practices. After ensuring them that this was not at all what was intended, we were able to finish the activity but I did not see any lasting changes in their writing. This school year has left me with more questions than answers regarding bridging the gap between home and school literacies. I am glad to have been able to make a variety of observations, and try a variety of strategies. While none of these proved effective, I did gain valuable information about my students’ literacies that will be helpful for me in planning my lessons, in the future. Now that I am much more aware of the gap between home, and school literacies, I will be able to anticipate, and accommodate them as they come. Hopefully, I will be able to use this new information to find more effective ways to teach students to code-switch and bridge the gap between home and school literacies while in the classroom.